Retail

The Argos catalogue: why Britain's love affair with The Book of Dreams had to end


How much do people in England love Argos? The answer comes from a surprising source: information concerning the riots that swept the country in the summer of 2011. When rioters fancied chucking a brick through a shop window and seeing what they could walk out with, Argos’s premises were the most commonly targeted. More people wanted to steal stuff from Argos than anywhere else.

That is not something about which Argos boasts – most-looted shop in England, 2011! – but it is a measure of how British people perceive Argos: the place that has everything (even if, in reality, the shops have only things that will sell immediately, or stuff that has been ordered for collection by customers). Why do we think Argos has everything? Because of its catalogue, “The Book of Dreams”.

Last week, though, Argos announced the dream was over: after almost 50 years and 93 editions, totalling more than 1bn copies, the catalogue is to cease publication. Although there will still be a Christmas gift guide, it is the end for the printed edition – which had swelled to nearly 2,000 pages in its later years. From now on, you will need to go online, or browse on the in-store screens. No more lying on the sofa with a pen, a catalogue and a precariously balanced cup of tea.

People remember as children circling the toys they wanted in the catalogue.
People remember as children circling the toys they wanted in the catalogue. Photograph: Michael Hay/retromash.com

The grief was immediate and real. “So farewell then, Laminated Book of Dreams, Wipe-Clean Almanac of Aspirations, Sanitised Lexicon of Possibility,” tweeted the comedian Bill Bailey. “I, like so many others, will briefly mourn your passing before instantly kowtowing to our new Touch-Screen Overlords.” The rapper Slowthai – perhaps best known for brandishing a model of Boris Johnson’s severed head at last year’s Mercury Prize ceremonynoted: “Argos is gonna stop printing its catalogue. I spent most [of] my childhood circling shit I was never gonna get.”

There is a temptation to view the Proustian rush of the Argos catalogue as a uniquely British phenomenon. That is not so, notes the American writer Robin Cherry, author of Catalog: The Illustrated History of Mail-Order Shopping. “During the second world war, they used to send Sears catalogues to injured American soldiers, because it would remind them of their homes,” she says. “And the whole ‘dream’ idea? Neiman Marcus [in the US] was the first to do that – it started the ‘his and hers’ Christmas gifts thing.” She notes that Neiman Marcus’s Christmas catalogue was such a big seasonal event that the broadcaster Ed Murrow – when not trying to end McCarthyism – would produce an annual report on what the department store had anointed as the year’s must-have present.

Still, no cult of catalogue collectors exists in the US quite like that of the Argos catalogue collectors in the UK. Currently, there are people on eBay asking £20 for the most recent edition, doubtless expecting the stores to have been emptied after Argos’s announcement. Michael Hay, 44, is one such collector, although Argos catalogues are just one element of the cultural ephemera he celebrates on his website, retromash.com. It is the catalogues that people enjoy the most, he says. “When people come round my house they always get excited about them,” he says. “And they get the most hits on my website.” But he has been surprised to discover the nostalgic hit they deliver is not just a “remember Spangles and white dog poo?” piece of whimsy: he also gets calls from the families of those with Alzheimer’s or dementia, who have found that showing them catalogues helps them link their present with their past. “That can be very beneficial. It’s nice to help in that small way.”

Hay’s collection began early in the last decade, when he bought a copy on eBay. “It snowballed from there. I got some from friends who found them in attics. I’ve been contacted by people who used to work for Argos and had stashes of them and then sent me their collections.” He has every issue bar one (“Which I’m hoping to get next week”), up to 1994: he is not interested in modern Argos, only in its history. “It’s a window back to the past, a time machine. It’s not just a random collection of pictures of items – it’s a snapshot of the culture of that particular year,” he says.

“Catalogues are useful tools for looking at society,” says Steve Miles, a professor of sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, specialising in the sociology of retail. “They are historical documents from a world that has rapidly changed, and taste is a very important aspect of that. Taste isn’t about what you consume or your aesthetic approach; our tastes demonstrate our aspiration to belong to a particular sector of society. We assert our place in society through what we buy, so a catalogue is a way to assert ourselves.”

Flick through old Argos catalogues online and you see precisely what he means. You can trace some of the paths of social change through these pages. Take one catalogue at random and you could construct the set for an entire period drama from it: the 1982/83 edition, for example, celebrates the passage of pine from effete Scandinavian wood to mainstay of the home, with both “pine for the kitchen” and “pine for the bedroom”. This being the golden age of the Breville sandwich-maker – when millions of Britons believed the perfect sandwich was toasted, sealed at the sides and containing a filling approximately the temperature of molten gold – you can choose from 12 separate sandwich-makers (though only three child car seats, because children – let’s be frank – matter less than sandwiches).

An Argos catalogue from 1976-7.
An Argos catalogue from 1976-7. Photograph: Argos

That edition also featured the first Argos listing for what would eventually destroy the catalogue: the home computer, although not a brand you would be likely to choose for your next laptop: “The home computer from Texas Instruments – it’s a whole new way to learn.” The following year, TI was still there, but joined by two new computers – the Vic-20 and Mattel’s Aquarius. The real business by 83/84, though, was the new fad of electronic gaming: there are nine pages of listings for electronic games, with 34 more for the old-fashioned stuff: board games, dolls, action figures and the like.

To leaf through an Argos catalogue is a sensory experience, too. Jingles and slogans come flooding back as you see the products: “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down”, “The great smell of Brut”, “Braun Independent – anytime, anywhere”. The catalogue feels as though it symbolises something more profound than kids circling what they want for Christmas, but what?

“It was symbolic of a particular period in history when consumption became a key element of how we identified ourselves,” Miles says. The catalogue was a way to forge our identities based on aspiration and with it, “made the link between choice and freedom”, he says. The idea was that “through its freedom of choice, and through consumption, we could somehow achieve a degree of fulfilment. The end of the catalogue demonstrates we are moving beyond that.”

Implicit in that reading of the Argos catalogue is its class dimension. Argos – with its gold watches, its affordable jewellery, its music centres and DIY pages – was a working-class shop. One could go further: it was the shop that embodied the Thatcherite dream of bringing the working class far enough into the middle class that they need never vote Labour again (not, naturally, that Argos was driving this, merely reflecting it). Although born in the 70s, Argos came of age in the Thatcher years: the company was bought by British American Tobacco in 1979; in 1990, it was demerged and floated on the stock market. It did as its customers did: it bettered itself.

What people aspired to in 1995-6.
What people aspired to in 1995-6. Photograph: Argos

Although the catalogue’s selling point was price – “Buy it at Argos and pocket the difference,” proclaimed the covers of the early editions – it made sure it did not exclude the middle classes. “It was hugely democratic, and that’s a factor in its success,” says Lucie Greene, a brand adviser and cultural forecaster. “It doesn’t have class associations in the same way as John Lewis, which could not be more middle class. Argos is quite universal, and it’s baked into people’s collective memory of commerce from quite a young age.”

Argos has also been one of retail’s great innovators. Natalie Berg, founder of the consultancy NBK Retail, moved to the UK from the US 15 years ago and at first was baffled by the Argos catalogue (“I had a hard time getting my head round why someone would want a leopard-print all-in-one”), but she frequently uses it to illustrate forward-thinking business practices. “Argos, in my view, was unknowingly ahead of its time,” she says. “It was the analogue version of Amazon and, even today, I think it is one of the few high-street retailers that keeps Amazon on its toes.” She observes that click and collect – now a mainstay of online shopping – was pioneered by Argos; she notes its merging of the physical and digital retail worlds; she says that Argos is usually quicker than Amazon; and she predicts: “More shops in future will look like Argos – they will have less selling space, and stores will become mini-warehouses to meet demands for anything.” The digital revolution, she says, has made Argos more universal in terms of appeal. “It could be less of a value retailer, and could instead compete based on convenience – basically Amazon with stores. That’s clearly why Sainsbury bought it [in 2016].”

There’s another little oddity, though. The big buzz in retail now is making things “experiential”, so going shopping is about more than shopping. Retailers want to give you experiences that make you return – demonstrations of skills, pop-up cafes, that sort of thing. I suggest to Berg that the Argos catalogue was actually primitive experiential retailing, in that what people remember is not queuing up to collect the goods, but the hours spent at home picking them: that is what all the mournful tweets dwelt on. Berg isn’t so sure, although she says: “I definitely give my kids a catalogue to keep them quiet, and I suppose that’s tapping into something.” Greene, though, sees the parallels, noting the high-end catalogues that look like coffee-table books and serve not so much as sales tools but as lifestyle porn. They are all experience, no retail – Argos served a not dissimilar function.

What killed the Argos catalogue, almost certainly, was that it was no longer worth the cost of printing against the sales it directly generated. But what made it lose its central place in everyday life was the way social media transformed so many people’s sense of self, so the act of consumption became less about having what everyone else has and more about having things no one else has. Miles and Greene both bring up this theme. Greene says: “We got taught to be consumers in the 50s, to want things and think about trends, but trend has given way to this sense of constant curation, and brands being an expression of your identity and taste. Everyone wants to some degree to be a tastemaker, so you don’t want to buy stuff everyone else has.” Miles observes that we are undergoing a shift to sculpting our identities not from the products we display, but “the things we engage in”.

The public grief about the end of the The Book of Dreams, then, is not so much about losing the chance to look at carriage clocks, toolkits and electric blankets, but more about mourning how we have changed. (“When was the last time you really flicked through an Argos catalogue?” Berg asks. Well, probably not since my kids got more interested in screens than physical objects).

Everything passes, and everyone changes, as even Hay would acknowledge. “We wallpapered one of our bathrooms with pages from old Argos catalogues,” he says. “But that’s going to be redecorated.” Farewell, The Book of Dreams.





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